The PRESIDENT: I am very glad to be able to announce that Miss Rathbone has kindly consented to exhibit some extremely interesting charts which have been prepared and exhibited in connection with the work of the library school at Pratt and I am sure that all of you will miss something if you do not avail yourselves of the opportunity which is here presented to see them and to hear the explanation concerning them.
Miss RATHBONE: I am very glad indeed to tell you a little about our exhibition because we found it an interesting thing to do and the people who saw it were interested in it. The genesis of the matter was this: When Miss Alice Tyler was at the school this spring we were speaking about budget and other exhibitions and she said, "I do wish librarians could find some way of graphically presenting library work so that people could understand it as the child welfare work has been presented." That remark of hers, coupled with the fact the library school has never taken part in the exhibition that Pratt Institute has held for a great many years, at the end of the third term, suggested to me the idea of putting the problem to the class of devising an exhibition that should be a visual presentation of the school course and also of library work in general in a form that would be interesting and intelligible to the general public. After a visit to the Bureau of Municipal Research, where Dr. Allen gave them a talk on the value of graphic presentation of facts, I told the students that they were to have the entire responsibility of the planning and execution of this exhibition as a problem in the library administration seminar. It was, of course, an experiment but I was sufficiently convinced of its success after the class made their first and only report of progress, to invite the staffs of the neighboring public libraries to the exhibition. When the material was assembled and installed it created a good deal of interest both in the Institute among the librarians who saw it, and, best of all, on the part of the public at large. We had about five hundred visitors in the four days it was open and it seemed to awaken in the minds of the people who saw it some conception of what library work means. We heard many comments of this kind, "Well, now that I understand the work the library does, I am going to use it more intelligently." One high school boy said, "Gee! I've had an awful time trying to use this library before, but I think I know what it is about now." That sort of a thing made me realize that the exhibition might be of value to some of you as showing one way by which people could be interested in the actual work done in a library, so I wrote to see if space could be had to install it here. It was too late, however, so I simply brought up a few of the charts as examples.
The exhibition began with the technical work of the library—the progress of a book through the various steps was illustrated by a ladder the rungs of which were labeled, Book Selection, Ordering, Receiving, Accessioning, Classification, etc. Books were shown running toward this "Library Ladder," nimbly climbing the rungs, while at the top they acquire wings and fly "off to the public." This chart hung over a table on which the successive operations were shown in detail the same book being used as an illustration throughout. The successive steps were numbered to correspond to the rungs of the ladder. For example, Book Selection was shown by a group including the A. L. A. Booklist, the Book Review Digest and two or three of the reviews. The descriptive card read "No. 1. These are a few of the aids in book selection."
Following that was a chart (exhibiting it) to illustrate the utility of classification, on which was presented a group of ten scientific books unclassified, followed by the same ten in D. C. order, with the question, "In which group would it be easier to find the books on insects." That was followed by another exhibit to prove the utility of subject cataloging. Two copies of the same book were obtained, one new and the other quite worn, the book being Gleason White's "Practical designing," which is made up of a number of papers on minor arts, by different authorities. The new book with a single author card lay on the table surrounded by radiating interrogation points, questions unanswered, and over the book hung this inscription: "This book looks new. Why? Because nobody knows what is in it. It is poorly cataloged." The worn copy lay on the next table and radiating from that were a number of questions with the catalog cards that answer them attached. Over that was the screed: "This book shows wear. Why? Because it can be reached from twenty-four sources. It is well cataloged." People who had not known before what a catalog meant studied that thing out and the change of expression which came to their faces when they saw the new book and the worn book side by side and understood what it signified was delightful. It struck home.
The work of the reference department was tellingly illustrated by an arch in which the reference library was the keystone, all intellectual activities depending on it.
(Miss Rathbone then exhibited various other charts and described them in detail.)
In addition to this, children's work, the field work, the courses in binding and printing, the making of reading lists, the course in fiction were represented.
Altogether we felt that graphic illustration of library work was not only possible but distinctly worth while and that the exhibition had done a good work in educating the library's public, as well as the class, and we expect to make it a permanent feature of the year's work.
Adjourned.
The PRESIDENT: We begin this morning the fourth session of this Thirty-fifth Annual Conference and I shall ask the chairman of the Committee on Library Administration to submit at this time his report.
(Dr. Bostwick here read the report.)
The PRESIDENT: You have heard the report of the Committee on Administration. This report embodies some recommendations which it seems to the Chair should be acted upon. Therefore the recommendation which suggests the appointment of a committee to undertake certain work will be referred to the Executive Board for their attention, as, in accordance with the terms of the Constitution, it devolves upon the Executive Board to name the committees. The report will be printed in the proceedings.
(This report is printed with other committee reports. See page 126.)
Mr. RANCK: Mr. President, there is just one item, about questionnaires, if I may have a moment to state it, that I think the committee has not referred to. It is a matter of some importance to us at our library. I think we answer, in the form of questions of one kind or other, not all from libraries however, about a thousand a year. I should like to insist on the importance, when a blank is sent out on which spaces are left for writing in the answers, that a duplicate be sent so that a library can keep a copy of the answers sent. Again and again we have to copy them because we feel it very important that we should know just exactly what we are sending out in that way. And if possible, in the printing of that report I should like to see the committee include that, if they are willing to accept the suggestion.
The PRESIDENT: The suggestion is a very good one.
The PRESIDENT: I feel like congratulating you this morning upon the program for this fourth session, the general theme being: "Children and young people; their conditions at home, in the school and in the library." No matter how splendid a structure may be reared nor how beautiful it may be, without an adequate foundation it is most insecure. We have learned to realize in library work that we must begin at the beginning if our work is to have any perpetuity or any permanent result. We feel that, splendid and admirable in every way as the work with the adults is, that that alone is not enough. That work invites, as it deserves, our respect and admiration, but in the work with children is centered our affection. And when I say this I do not mean to intimate for one moment that that work is enveloped in sentiment. I believe most firmly that the work with children is constructive work of the very highest order. If there are any in this audience who doubt that I am sure that after we shall have heard the papers of this morning the doubts will be dispelled. We shall have this work in three volumes this morning, the first volume comprising two chapters. The title of the first volume is The Education of Children and the Conservation of their Interests, and Chapter One will be contributed by Miss FAITH E. SMITH, of the Chicago public library, on
It is now twenty-eight years since some one first recognized the fact that children needed to have special libraries or special collections of books in libraries, and thereupon opened a children's reading room in New York City.
Some of the conditions affecting child life today existed then, but we know more about them now than we did then. We have many specialists in sociological fields who are making investigations, compiling statistics, drawing conclusions, and telling other people how to make the world a better place. Our rapid industrial development is producing many problems concerning child welfare, some of which are of vital interest to us as library workers; others we may well leave to playground associations, juvenile courts, health bureaus, social settlements, child labor committees, schools and churches. It is not ours to change housing conditions or to do away with child labor, but it is ours to meet these conditions, to be god-parents to those whose natural parents are not inclined or not able to guide their reading, to present to the children's minds other worlds than the tenement or street, and to give to children worn with daily labor such books as will be within their grasp, and will help them to permanent happiness.
In 1885 when a children's library was opened by Miss Hanaway in New York City, there were fewer means of recreation than there are now. There were no motion-picture shows, no children's theaters, no municipal recreation parks with free gymnasiums, swimming pools and baths. Child labor had only begun to be exploited by large manufacturing establishments (1879). Then there were more homes, permanent abiding places, where there was room for children both to work and to play. There was more family life, where father and mother and children gathered about the evening lamp, and father read aloud while mother sewed and the children listened, or where each member of the family had his own book in which to lose himself. There were daily duties for each of the children, the performance of which gave them training in habits of responsibility.
Today such conditions may be found only rarely, except in small cities and villages.
Congestion in large cities has led even well-to-do families to live in apartment houses. In Chicago this sort of life began only thirty-four years ago, and today one-third of all that city live in residences having six families per main entrance. (Chicago City Club-Housing exhibit.) This tendency to apartment life means the loss of the joy of ownership, the feeling of not-at-homeness and consequent restlessness, due to frequent change of environment.
Book agents say that they cannot sell books to families in apartment houses, because they have no room for books. Scott Nearing in his "Woman and social progress" regrets "the woeful lack of provision for the needs of the child in the construction of the modern city home. Huge real estate signs advertise the bathroom, bedrooms, the dining room and kitchen, the library, and reception hall. But where is the children's room? Owners do not care to rent houses to people having children. Many of the apartment houses exclude children as they exclude dogs or other objectionable animals." Yet we say, and rightly, that this is the century of the child.
The complexity of modern life, the tendency to materialism, the multiplicity of interests, have deterred many parents from being actively concerned in the growth of the minds and the souls of their children. This part of their development is being left to teachers, church workers, leaders of boys' and girls' clubs, etc. There is not time for reading aloud to children at home, and little concern is manifested by many intelligent parents, regarding their children's choice of books. The "poor, neglected children of the rich" are not allowed to use the public library books, because there may be germs hidden among the leaves. They may have their own books, but they are denied the joy of reading a book that some other boy or girl has read and pronounced "swell".
Because of this lack of concern on the part of parents in children's reading, are we not justified in our hitherto condemned paternalism?
Home life among the very poor in the congested districts of our large cities is often such as is not worth the name. The practice of taking lodgers which prevails among some foreign elements of the population, means the undermining of family life, and often the breaking down of domestic standards. (Veiler, "Housing reform," p. 33.) "Thousands of children in Chicago alone are being exposed to the demoralizing influences of overcrowded rooms, of inadequate sanitary provisions, and of unavoidable contact with immoral persons."
"Bad housing is associated with the worst conditions in politics, poverty, population density, tuberculosis, and retardation in the schools. It is directly related to many cases of delinquency of boys and girls, who have been brought before the juvenile court." (Breckenridge and Abbott, "The delinquent child and the home.")
Furthermore wrong home conditions result in driving children to the street. The child who finds no room at home to do the things that he wishes to do, not even room to study his school lessons, is inevitably forced into the street, "not only in the day time, but as common observation shows, until late at night, not only in good weather but in foul." Here he grows up, and is educated "with fatal precision." The saloon and its victims, the hoboes and their stories, criminals dodging the police, lurid signboards, a world of money-getting, all become only too familiar to him. Sin loses its sinfulness, and gains in interest and excitement.
Are we placing our attractive children's rooms, clean and orderly, adorned with flowers and fine pictures, where they may be readily seen from the street, where picture books placed in the windows may vie in alluring powers with the nickel-novel window displays?
The boy of the street may be a member of a boys' gang, and if so, this becomes one of the great influences acting upon his life, either for good or for ill. Mr. Puffer makes the statement that three-fourths of all boys are members of gangs. (Puffer, "The boy and his gang," p. 9.)
Those boys are fortunate whose gang is an organized body efficiently directed, such as the Boys' Scout Patrol. This, Mr. Puffer says, "is simply a boys' gang, systematized, overseen, affiliated with other like bodies, made efficient and interesting, as boys alone could never make it, and yet everywhere, from top to bottom a gang." Here lies an opportunity for co-operation on the part of the library, and many are the interests awakened by the Boy Scout movement which may be encouraged by the library.
Another influence constantly appealing to children of the street as well as to others, is the glaring advertisement of the moving-picture show. Moving pictures are now the most important form of cheap amusement in this country; they reach the young, immigrants, family groups, the formative and impressionable section of our cities, as no other form of amusement, and can not but be vital influences for good or ill. In 1910 it was estimated that more than half a million children attended motion pictures daily. (Juvenile Protective Assn. of Chicago, "Five and ten-cent theaters"—pamphlet.)
Is it not possible for the library to make permanent whatever good, though fleeting, impression may be made by educational pictures or pictures from great books, by co-operating with the picture shows, and being ready to supply to the children copies of the stories, nature books, or histories to which the children may have been attracted by the motion pictures?
During the meetings this week our interest in the adult immigrants and their relation to the library has been aroused and augmented, and it has been proven conclusively that the solution of the immigrant problem must of necessity rest with the children. The change in the type of immigration in recent years from a large percentage of English-speaking and Scandinavian races having a low percentage of illiteracy, to a leadership among races of eastern and southern Europe, with a very high percentage of illiteracy, has had a decided influence on standards of living.
These people of other lands do not adapt themselves to American ways as readily as their children. Many do not know the English language, they do not stir far from home or from work, and have few new experiences. "Many things which are familiar to the child in the facts of daily intercourse, in the street or in the school, remain unintelligible to the father and mother. It has become a commonplace that this cheap wisdom on the part of the boy or girl leads to a reversal of the relationship between parent and child. The child who knows English is the interpreter who makes the necessary explanations for the mother to the landlord, the grocer, the sanitary inspector, the charity visitor, and the teacher or truant officer. It is the child again who often interviews the boss, finds the father a job, and sees him through the onerous task of 'joining the union.' The father and mother grow accustomed to trusting to the child's version of what 'they all do in America,' and gradually find themselves at a disadvantage in trying to maintain parental control. The child develops a sense of superiority towards the parent and a resulting disregard of those parental warnings which, although they are not based on American experience, rest on common notions of right and wrong, and would, if heeded, guard the child." (Breckenridge and Abbott, "The delinquent child and the home.")
Can books not teach children to honor their father and mother, and "that the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is obey"?
We are told that one of the causes of crime among the children of foreigners is transmitted ambition. "The father left the homeland because he was not satisfied.... He worked hard and saved money, that the dream of better things might be realized.... The son manifests this innate tendency by a desire to excel, by the longings to rise and be masterful, the ambition to beat the other fellow—these are the motives which impel him to an intensive life that carries him to excess and transgression." (Roberts, "The new immigration," p. 325.)
It is for us to interest this ambition and turn it into right channels. We may also discover what special interests are uppermost in the minds of those of different nationalities, things they wish their children to love, traditions they have cherished, and which we may help the children to cherish.
Driven by necessity or by the spirit of the age, the immigrant quickly develops a strong ambition for acquiring money, supposing that he landed on our shores without that impelling force. One of the consequences is that he withdraws his children from school as soon as they are old enough to secure their working papers. "To the Italian peasant, who, as a gloriously street laborer begins to cherish a vision of prosperity, it matters little whether his girls go to school or not. It is, on the contrary, of great importance that a proper dower be accumulated to get them good husbands; and to take them from school to put them to work is, therefore, only an attempt to help them accomplish this desirable end." (Breckenridge and Abbott.)
In 1911 the National Child Labor Committee conducted an investigation of tenement house work in New York City. Among 163 families visited having 213 children, 196 children ranging in ages from 3½ to 14 years were working on nuts, brushes, dolls' clothes, or flowers. These are truly not the good old-fashioned domestic industries in which children received a good part of their education. Those working in factories and tenement sweat shops, where labor is specialized and subdivided into innumerable operations, do not get the variety of employment that cultivates resourcefulness, alertness, endurance and skill. (Child labor bulletin, Nov., 1912.)
We cannot expect these children, with bodies retarded in development by overwork, and without proper nourishment, to be able to take the same mental food that is pleasing to other children of the same age, who have had all necessary physical care.
The hours when working children, those engaged in gainful occupations, and those who are helping in the homes, are free for recreation, are in the evening and on Sunday. Are we placing our most skilled workers on duty at these times, and are we opening our story hours and reading clubs on Sunday afternoons, when the minds of these children are most receptive of good things, when the children are dressed in their good clothes, their self-respect is high, and they are free from responsibility?
It is a well-known fact that the need of money is not the only cause of the exodus from school that occurs in the grades. An investigation made by the Commissioner of Labor in 1910 (Condition of woman and child wage-earners in the U. S., vol. 7), examining the conditions of white children under 16, in five representative cities, showed that of those children interviewed, 169 left school because earnings were necessary, and 165 because dissatisfied with school. The Chicago Tribune (Nov. 11, 1912) stated that in 1912 there were in Chicago over 23,000 children between 14 and 16 years of age, who were not in school. Over half of these were unemployed, and the remainder had employment half the time at ill-paid jobs, teaching little and leading nowhere. In 1912 there were 34,000 children of Philadelphia not in school, and only 13,000 were employed. (Philadelphia City Club Bulletin, Dec. 27, 1912.)
The curriculum of our public schools is in a transitional stage. The complaint of parents who take their children from school before they have completed the high school course, is that it does not teach them to earn a living. The desire of commercial men is to have such courses introduced as will lessen the need of apprentice training in their establishments. These changes may help boys and girls to earn a living, but those courses which teach them how to live may be sacrificed. Man does not live by bread alone. Mrs. Ella Flagg Young says, "The training must also implant in the mind a desire to become something—I mean by that an ideal.... It must make the boys and girls able to know that they have possibilities of greater development along many lines." This sort of training is within the sphere of the library as well as within that of the schools.
The children in the rural districts (which the 1910 census interprets as meaning people of towns of less than 2,500 inhabitants, and people of the country) are the library's great opportunity. In these districts may be found the old-fashioned home life, where parents are glad to be aided in the direction of their children's reading. There are fewer distractions in the way of amusements. Books are not seen by the thousands, until they have become so confusing that one knows not what to read or where to begin. Homes are owned, instead of rented, and a library worker is not liable to lose her group of children each first of May.
The pleasures of city life have been made easily accessible to children and grown people by means of trolley lines, good roads, telephones, etc., and the music of grand opera has been carried to the country homes by means of talking machines. Still the distractions of modern life have not absorbed a large part of the everyday life of the children, so that their minds may be appealed to along the line of their natural interests. As Miss Stearns told us yesterday, there is less of drudgery in farm life today than there was thirty years ago, and children have more time for study and reading; but they need direction and assistance.
The consensus of opinion among writers on rural sociology is that the great need of the people of the country is more education; education that will make farming more scientific and efficient, and less fatiguing, education that will help boys and girls to find amusement in the life about them; education that will guide that passion for nature which every normal child possesses.
Because children today have many more opportunities for recreation than they had thirty years ago; because many leave school long before they have acquired the education that will teach them how to live, as well as how to earn a living; because in many homes mothers and fathers cannot train their children in American ideals of citizenship, which they themselves do not understand; because in other homes the physical needs of children are held to be of most importance, while mental and moral needs are left to the care of teachers and social workers, the time seems ripe for the library to place emphasis upon the educational side of its work, rather than upon the recreative. Let the recreative be truly recreative, giving relaxation, new visions, higher standards of living, and increased belief in one's self, but let the educational work meet the children's needs, increase their efficiency, teach them how to live, and to be of service in the world's work.
Mr. Bostwick, in the Children's section, mentioned three eras in library work with children; first, the era of children's books in libraries; second, era of children's room; third, era of children's department. These concerned books and organization, the machinery of getting the books to the children. We think we have learned something about children's books, and we know approved methods of administration. Possibly we are now on the verge of the fourth era, when we shall know children. Not the child with a capital C, a laboratory specimen, but living children, with hearts and souls. Do we know the conditions under which the children of our own neighborhood live? Do we understand their interests, and are we sanely sympathetic?
The PRESIDENT: We are glad to get Chapter Two: How the Library is Meeting these Conditions, by Miss GERTRUDE E. ANDRUS, of the Seattle public library.
Every month, if the mails are regular, we receive assurance that the public library is an integral part of public education, and the complacence with which we accept this assurance gives ample opportunity to our critics for those slings and arrows with which they are so ready. Ideas and ideals of education are rapidly changing and it behooves the librarian, and more particularly the children's librarian, to see that she keeps pace with the forward movement and that the ridicule of her censors is really undeserved.
The old idea of education was to abolish illiteracy, "to develop the ability, improve the habits, form the character of the individual, so that he might prosper in his life's activities and conform to certain social standards of conduct."
The new idea of education is that of social service, to train children to be not mere recipients, but distributors, not merely to increase their ability to care for themselves, but also their ability to care for others and for the state.
This perhaps sounds a note of the millennium, but we have been told to hitch our wagon to a star and although the star proves a restive steed and often lands us in the ditch, we travel further while the connection holds than we should in a long, continuous journey harnessed to a dependable but slow-going snail.
It may seem a far cry from these comments on education to the topic of my paper: How the library meets the changing conditions of child-life, but in reality it is only a step, for just as in philanthropy the emphasis is placed more and more upon prevention rather than remedy, so in education the task is coming to be the training of the good citizen rather than the correction of the bad citizen. And if the library is, as we are anxious to claim, an integral part of public education, it must have a share, however small, in the preventive policy of modern educators, which will in time effect a change in present social evils. Unless the library, as it meets these constantly changing conditions, can do something to improve them and to make the improvement stable, it has small claim to be included in the educational scheme of things.
In the conditions of child life which Miss Smith has outlined, the breaking up of the home is the most serious handicap which the children have to face. It is on this account that all social agencies working with children endeavor, so far as each is able, to supply an "illusory home" and to give, each in its own capacity, the training in various lines which ought in a normal home to come under the direction of the mother and father.
There is a spreading belief in the value of reading but there is a woeful lack of knowledge as to what should be read, and the children's library therefore fills a double rôle; it provides books which it would be impossible for many of the children to get otherwise, and it selects these books with thoughtful care of the special place each one has to fill, so that it becomes a counselor, not only to the children but to those parents who are anxious to assume their just responsibility in the guidance of their children's reading, and yet feel their inability to breast unaided the yearly torrent of children's books. The stimulation of this feeling of responsibility on the part of parents is one of the most effective means at the library's disposal of striking a blow at the root of the whole matter, for it is on the indifference of the parents that the blame for many juvenile transgressions should rest, which is now piled high upon the shoulders of the children.
In this connection mention should be made of the home library, the most social of all the library's activities. This small case of books, located in a home in the poorer quarters of a city and placed in charge of a paid or volunteer library assistant has been proved to be a potent force in the life of the neighborhood, for the "friendly visitor," if she be of the proper stuff, is not merely a circulator of books, she is an all-round good neighbor to whom come both children and mothers for help in their big and little problems, so that the results have proved to be "better family standards, greater individual intelligence, and more satisfactory neighborhood conditions."
But even granting that the mothers and fathers show a deep concern in what their children read, the connection between books and children is often left of necessity to the children's librarian who is selected with special reference to her adaptability to this particular kind of work. Now, no matter how strong a personality this young woman may possess, no matter how high her literary standards, nor how far-reaching her moral influence, it is obviously impossible for her to come in contact with more than a few of the children in her community. And in order to provide that intimacy with books from which we wish no child to be debarred, she must depend not alone upon her children's room, beautiful and homelike though that may be, but she must place her resources at the disposal of other educational agencies, all of which are working toward a common end. Of these the most powerful is the school, and through the lessons in the use of the public library, through the collections of books placed in the schoolrooms, and most of all through the influence of the teacher, the public library will touch the lives of thousands of children who might otherwise be in ignorance of its resources, and who through this contact will receive a vivid impression of their share as citizens in a great public institution. In this correlation of school and library care must be taken to place an equal emphasis upon the library as a place for recreation as well as a place for study.
Contrary to the teachings of our Puritan forefathers, we are growing more keenly alive to the imperative need of healthful recreation as a means of combating existing social conditions, and our great cities and our little villages are gradually making provision for the gratification of the desire of the people to play. Nowhere does the library find an alliance more satisfactory than with these play-centers, for it is in the union of the physical and mental development that education comes to its fullest fruition and the striving to instill "imagination in recreation" can find no better field than in these places where not only muscles but minds may be exercised.
These are the well-worn channels through which the children's library pours its stream of books into a thirsty land, channels into which run the tributary streams of deposit stations, churches, settlements, telegraph offices, newsboys' homes, and all the rest which it would only weary you to repeat.
We are constantly engaged in deepening and broadening these channels because we believe in the power of books to develop character and to broaden the vision of that "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." Now the book that does this most effectively is the book behind which lies some personality. We all know the popularity of "the book Teacher says is good." But the problem of the children's librarian is not limited as is the teacher's to two or three dozen children. She must lay her plans to reach hundreds of children and she can do this only by dealing with the children in groups: in other words, in clubs, reading circles, and story-tellings.
The natural group of child life is the boys' gang or the girls' clique which offer unlimited opportunities for good or ill. The tendency of a neglected group is to develop strongly a regard for the interests of the individual group and make it antagonistic, if not actually dangerous, to the larger group of society.
The possibility of touching children's interests, enlarging their horizon, and influencing their ideals through these groups has been utilized in the club work of many libraries. Although all library clubs lead eventually to books, the way may be a circuitous one and baseball, basketry, and dramatics may be met on the way. But aside from the book interest, without which no library club can be considered legitimate, there is the opportunity of guiding the activities of the group by means of debate work or similar interests so that their attention may be directed outside of their immediate environment and made to include the greater possibilities of the larger social group.
Very often in girls' clubs the charitable impulse is strong and may be so led as to instill a very thoughtful sympathy for others.
It is for the things we know best that we have the most sympathy and the truest devotion, and we may expect real patriotism and an active civic conscience only when we have taught the children to know thoroughly their country and the city in which they live. This is some of the most valuable work that is being done by libraries, and it may be well passed on, as has been done in Newark, to become a part of the school curriculum. Indifference to the fatherland is not the best foundation on which to build the superstructure of American patriotism, and the confused and homesick foreigner welcomes with gratitude the books in his own tongue provided by the library, the opportunity to use the library's auditorium for the meetings of his clubs with unpronounceable names, the respect with which his especial predilections and prejudices are considered by the library in his immediate neighborhood, the display of his national flag and the special stories told the children on the fete day of his country. A people without traditions is not a people, and if we expect these strangers to respect our institutions, we must show them an equal courtesy.
This regard shown by the library and other institutions for the national characteristics of the parents reacts upon the children and they grow to understand that though their elders may have been outstripped in the effort to become Americanized they have behind them an historical background which is respected by the very Americans whose customs the children ape so carefully.
The reading circle and the story hour are similar in their purpose for they are both intended to call the attention of the children to special books and to open up the delights of a new world to imaginations often starved in squalor and poverty. Both the reading aloud and the storytelling have their rightful place in the home and are merely grafted on the library in its attempt to supply its share of the "illusory home" for which we are striving.
If the Sunday story-tellings and clubs meet the neighborhood needs more efficiently as Miss Smith has suggested, the library schedule should be so arranged as to accommodate them.
The time of childhood is a time of unbounded curiosities. Everything is new and wonderful and open to investigation, and that library may count itself blessed of the gods which can command the co-operation of a good museum. Given an exhibit case containing a few interesting specimens, a placard bearing a brief description of the specimens, and the titles of a few books on the subject obtainable at the library, and we can all of us picture a rosy dream of budding scientists, nature-lovers, and historians.
This child-like interest is the secret of the popularity of the moving-picture show. Here we see unfolded the processes of nature, the opening of a flower, the life of a bee, we ride in a runaway train and in an aeroplane, and we see enacted the daily human drama of love and hate. Here is an opportunity which many libraries have grasped, and slides are furnished the picture theaters announcing the location of the library and bearing some such legend as this: "Your Free Public Library has arranged with this management to select interesting books and magazine articles upon the historical, literary, and industrial subjects treated in these pictures. It is a bright idea to see something good and then learn more about it." Mr. Percy Mackaye in his recent book on the Civic Theater, comments on this as follows: "A brighter idea—may we not add?—if the founders of the library had recognized the dynamic appeal of a moving-picture house, and endowed it to the higher uses of civic art! Truly, a spectacle, humorous but pathetic: Philanthropy in raiment of marble, humbly beseeching patronage from the tattered Muse of the people!"
So far as the writer knows, but one library has as yet made moving pictures a permanent addition to its activities, although a small town in Washington State has intimated that it would do so, provided the Carnegie Trust Fund would give it money. It is a sign of the times, and one of which note must be taken, for it gives the library a chance to deepen the benefit of such good pictures as there are and to raise the standard of the others.
Unfortunately the interest of many boys and girls is forced prematurely to the subject of how they may aid in the family support. They leave school untrained and unfitted for the life they have to live, and go into shops, factories, department stores, and other service. Whether they leave because of economic pressure or because of a lack of interest in their school work the fact remains that 32 per cent of the children entering school drop out before they reach the sixth grade, and only 8 per cent finish the fourth year of high school. Manual training and vocational guidance are taking a hand in the matter and the part of the library is evident, not only in its supply of books on these topics but in the personal interest of the library assistants and in their suggestions and advice to the young folks who are struggling to find themselves. This is of course but a drop in the bucket but it is an effort in the right direction.
So many of these young people leaving school prematurely are shut up at the crucial age of adolescence in huge factories and stores, creeping home at night too tired to move unnecessarily, or letting the individuality which has been so sternly repressed all day burst forth in excesses and indiscretions. Only a few will come to the library, so to make sure the library must go to them.
One of the most notable examples of this kind of work is in the main plant of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. The company furnishes room, heat, light, and librarian's salary and the public library provides the books. This type of library may combine the intimate personal relationships of the small branch, the club, the story hour, and the vocational bureau. It may, as the Sears, Roebuck library has done, publish lists of books covering certain grades of a school course in grammar, rhetoric, history of literature, and study of the classics, and through the personal influence of the librarian it may make these courses really used, for always in work of this kind it is the personal equation that counts.
Some commercial houses have independent libraries of their own, sometimes in connection with their service department, as does the Joseph & Feiss Co. of Cleveland, in which case the direction of the library comes under the charge of a person whose duty it is to use every means to deepen, strengthen, and broaden the capacity of every employe so that he may remain an individual and not become a machine. This is an age of industrialism which has early placed upon the boys and girls the responsibilities of life, and the love of books is one of the most important of the influences which will keep the pendulum from swinging too far upon the side of materialism and purely commercial ambition.
These are some of the ways in which the library is trying to meet the changing conditions of child life in the city through the children's rooms, the homes, the schools, the playgrounds, the factories, and other institutions which have to do with the employment, amusement, or education of children.
From many of these problems the life of the country child is mercifully free, but in place of them there is the isolation of farm life and the idleness on the part of the children so often found in country villages. As more than half of our population is in the country, it is but logical that libraries should long ago have made some attempt to reach a class of readers who, as Mr. Dewey says, "have a larger margin of leisure, fewer distractions, and fewer opportunities to get the best reading. They read more slowly and carefully and get more good from books than their high-pressure city cousins whose crowded lives leave little time for intellectual digestion."
Long before the formation of the Country Life Commission, librarians were sending traveling libraries to farm-houses and rural communities, and library commissions are now scattering broadcast the opportunities for reading which will do so much to "effectualize rural society." When we think of books and the country, we think also of Hagerstown and the book wagon, an institution which in its influence on country life may well be added to the famous trilogy of "rural free delivery, rural telephones, and Butterick patterns." Greater attention is being paid in these days to conditions of country life, both on farms and in villages, and the work of the country librarian is as broad and as interesting as that of her city co-worker.
But whether the work is done in the city or the country, in a crowded tenement district or on a thousand-acre ranch, it has as its foundation the same underlying principle: that of co-operation with all other available agencies to the end that the boys and girls may have a fuller opportunity to become good citizens. We cannot be progressive if we are not plastic, and in the adaptation of our work to the changing conditions of child life lies the secret of the value of the children's library.
The PRESIDENT: We give a sigh of satisfaction and one of regret: satisfaction over the pleasure we have had in listening to these fine, moving chapters; regret that they have been so brief. We are reconciled only by the fact that there are two fine companion volumes still to come. Mr. WILLIS H. KERR, of the Kansas State Normal School, will give us the first one, the subject being:
That there is a close relation between librarianship and the forces of education is implied both in the special topic of this paper and in the general theme of the morning: "Children and young people; their conditions at home, in the school, and in the library." Indeed librarian and teacher have more in common than we yet think. For real library work is teaching, and real teaching is guidance in living, and to live well for thy neighbor and thyself is—real library work.
The burden of this discussion will be, not whether the library is an integral part of education, but rather what modern education, as an art, science, and practice, has to say about the attitude and method and practice of library work. With open mind and modest, may we attempt a statement of "library pedagogy" to parallel current educational practice? How may we librarians knit our work more effectively into the educational fabric? How best correlate people and books?
If such a statement of library pedagogy is possible, even though tentative, it is worth our while. From college days there rings in my ears the topic of an address by Dr. Samuel B. McCormick, now President of the University of Pittsburgh: "We can achieve that which we can intelligently conceive and adequately express." We must see our whole job through and through if we are to cope with our friends who do not yet see what we are at. The good brother, a Ph. D. of one of our best universities, a successful city school superintendent, now a fellow professor, who said, "I can see how instruction of our normal school students in library methods will help them in their work here, but how will it help them as teachers? Anyone can find a book in a school library." The superintendent who complained that all his pupils got at the public library was sore eyes and ruined minds from reading trashy fiction; the library trustee who likened library work and salary to dry-goods counter service and wage; the typewriter salesman who objected to open shelves and book wagons and story hours, because they cost—I won't say how much he said; what infinite patience, what skillful teaching power must we librarians have, to turn this tide and use it?
Lest we paint the picture too darkly, let it be said with all thankfulness and cheer that multitudes of teachers, superintendents, boys, girls, men and women, do understand. There is Superintendent Condon, formerly of Providence, now of Cincinnati, of whom Mr. Foster says in the last (1912) Providence report: "Mr. Condon's co-operation with the library was constant, intelligent, and effective." There is Mary Antin and her brothers and sisters, Americans all, to whom one of the richest gifts of the "Promised Land" is the public library. There is State Superintendent Alderman, of Oregon, and Mrs. Alderman. There is the United States Commissioner of Education, Mr. Claxton, and Mrs. Claxton. In every state are men like a western Kansas superintendent (way out next to Colorado, on the prairies), who found his community destitute of books; even school books and tablets had to be ordered by the drug store from a distant city; no community interest, no debating societies, no class plays, no school athletic teams. He made school vital to the boys and girls. Then because to his thinking education does not end with school days, and because he had the library vision, before he was there a year he passed the subscription paper, organized the library association, got the books and magazines, and opened the public library. He gave that town something to live for. And every state has librarians like the little Kansas lady in a country community who does reference work and draws patrons from sixteen surrounding school districts by the use of the rural telephone.
What have the normal schools to do with all this? Before answering this question, it may be well to note that the term "normal school" has not always the same significance. In the United States there are 194 public normal schools. Scholastic standards are of three general types: First, the old-time normal school, whose graduates have little more than completed a high school course including some required pedagogy. Second, the largest division, the two-year normal school, which requires two years of college cultural and professional work, high school graduation being required for entrance. Third, the normal college or state teachers' college, which grants the bachelor's degree for the completion of four years of college cultural and professional work. As a rule the graduates of the high school normal course go into the rural or the small-town schools; the graduates of the two-year college course, into elementary schools and special subjects; and the graduates of the four-year college course, into high school subjects, principalships, and superintendencies. The four-year state teachers' colleges of the United States can be counted on the ten fingers, and their ultimate sphere of influence is being debated. It would seem, however, that the adequate teacher-training institution must be as broad in its facilities and standards as are the conditions of modern life with which teachers must cope.
In the normal schools of these three types, student attendance varies from 100 to nearly 3,000, the average being about 600. Faculties vary from 8 or 10 members to 125. Equipment varies correspondingly, the better schools having very complete facilities. For example, the Eastern Illinois State Normal School, at Charleston, which is said to have a faculty ranking in scholarship with the universities, has 1,200 students, 31 members of faculty, offers two college years of teacher-training, has three buildings, a library of 16,000 volumes, and like many other normal schools of its type has an assured future and a fine field of influence. You will pardon another example, I hope, cited because I can be still more definite in describing it: The Kansas State Normal School, at Emporia, is a type of the four-year normal college. It was established in 1865. Last year it had 2,750 students, 350 in the training school (comprising kindergarten and grades one to eight), 1,100 in the normal high school, and 1,300 in the college. It had a faculty of 100, nearly half of these being men, many of the best universities being represented. It has 11 buildings, including an enormous gymnasium, a library, a hospital, a training school, science building, etc. It has a department of library science, in charge of a professor giving full time to that department, and on the same plane as other departments of instruction. Of this same general type, in equipment, numbers, and standards, are the schools at Ypsilanti, Michigan; Cedar Falls, Iowa; Kirksville, Missouri; Greeley, Colorado; Terre Haute, Indiana;—I do not mean to slight other worthy examples.
Aside from these three types of public normal schools, another important type of teacher-training organization is the department of education and psychology in our best colleges and universities, exemplified notably by the School of Education of the University of Chicago, and Teachers' College of Columbia University, the last-named being perhaps the most efficient teachers' college in the world. I hasten to add mention of the conspicuously helpful work in educational psychology, pure and applied, which is being done at Clark University, Massachusetts, under the inspiring leadership of Dr. G. Stanley Hall.
Now, using the term "normal schools" to include all of these types of institutions and as representing their practices and ideals, may we ask the question we left a moment ago, "What have the normal schools to do with librarianship?" This: The normal schools have now consciously taken up the task of preparing teachers who understand the life that now is and can teach boys and girls to live that life and to be useful members of society here and hereafter. These organized institutions of teacher-training take themselves seriously, they accept the responsibility of their task, and they are measurably succeeding; despite the declarations of popular magazines and investigating committees that our schools are a colossal failure. Which they are not, for didn't they train Mary Antin, and Miss Stearns, and you and me? If librarianship is educational work, and it is, the normal schools may therefore have some suggestion of educational practice worthy the consideration of librarians.
What is the educational world thinking and doing? Examine the program of the National Education Association, to meet week after next at Salt Lake City. I group some of the topics from the general sessions: First, What is education?; Education for freedom; The personal element in our educational problems; Teaching, and testing the teaching of essentials; Measuring results. Second, What shall we do with the single-room school?; The rural school; Fundamental reorganizations demanded by the rural life problem; Rural betterments; The schoolhouse evening center. Third, moral values in pupil self-government, The high school period as a testing time, Public schools and public health.
Relate these groups of topics with this definition of education from the late Andrew S. Draper, of honored memory: